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13.7 billion years BC – The universe begins as a singularity; those who believe in the “big bang” theory suggest the disaster is on-going…

3.8 billion years BC – The start of life on Earth. The first cell is thought to have arisen from self-replicating RNA what developed later into DNA. DNA is a store of biological data, the genetic information that allows all modern living things to function, grow and reproduce. Put another way, you are the backup of your parents. Say hi to the therapist for me.

65 million years BC – Dinosaurs, not backed up.

13.7 billion years BC – The universe begins as a singularity; those who believe in the “big bang” theory suggest the disaster is on-going…

3.8 billion years BC – The start of life on Earth. The first cell is thought to have arisen from self-replicating RNA what developed later into DNA. DNA is a store of biological data, the genetic information that allows all modern living things to function, grow and reproduce. Put another way, you are the backup of your parents. Say hi to the therapist for me.

65 million years BC – Dinosaurs, not backed up.

48 BC – The burning of the Library of Alexandria. Among others in your “Top 10 Lost Books of All Time,” the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics went up in smoke and humanity was beginning to realize the fatal flaw in their cunning backup plan; paper is actually quite flammable.

1347 AD – The first known insurance contract is signed in Genoa, Italy. This was great for those buying and selling goods and owning property but information is difficult to value, most people would rather have their data back than receive compensation for its loss.

1436 AD – Johannes Gutenberg, a former goldsmith, created the first printing press in Germany. He used his knowledge of metalwork to fashion letters out of an alloy, pressing these against ink and then paper to create a copy. This made the printing of multiple copies considerably faster, a great step forward in data resilience.

1539 AD – Image based backup, born. Henry VIII, King of England was trying to decide who to marry next, he sent the artist Hans Holbein to make a reliable copy of what his list of European princesses looked like. Based on these images, Henry made his choice and proposed engagement to Anne of Cleeves only to discover she looked nothing like he expected. Corrupt data/bad copy.

48 BC – The burning of the Library of Alexandria. Among others in your “Top 10 Lost Books of All Time,” the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics went up in smoke and humanity was beginning to realize the fatal flaw in their cunning backup plan; paper is actually quite flammable.

1347 AD – The first known insurance contract is signed in Genoa, Italy. This was great for those buying and selling goods and owning property but information is difficult to value, most people would rather have their data back than receive compensation for its loss.

1436 AD – Johannes Gutenberg, a former goldsmith, created the first printing press in Germany. He used his knowledge of metalwork to fashion letters out of an alloy, pressing these against ink and then paper to create a copy. This made the printing of multiple copies considerably faster, a great step forward in data resilience.

1539 AD – Image based backup, born. Henry VIII, King of England was trying to decide who to marry next, he sent the artist Hans Holbein to make a reliable copy of what his list of European princesses looked like. Based on these images, Henry made his choice and proposed engagement to Anne of Cleeves only to discover she looked nothing like he expected. Corrupt data/bad copy.

1964 AD – Mass market computing begins, the Programma 101 was unveiled to the public at the New York World’s fair. One of these computers was used on Apollo 11 and it was pretty much… a calculator. “One small step…” (at a time!)

1972 AD – Mainframe computers deliver applications and data at high speed to hundreds of users, in-built hardware redundancy ensures exceptional RPOs and RTOs. The ancient Sumerians would have just lovedthis.

1990 AD – Arcserve 1.0 released by Cheyenne software. The age of distributed computing is in full swing and it is all about backing up to these little rectangular things called “tapes.”

1998 AD – VMware founded in Palo Alto, California. Although the concept of a hypervisor originated from 1960s, it was VMware who introduced hardware virtualization to the mass market. Virtualization will go on to revolutionize backup and disaster recovery.

2006 AD – XOsoft’s WANsync technology is integrated into Arcserve. For the first time mid-market users can perform both backup and full system failover from one solution.

2008 AD – Microsoft releases their competing product to VMware, they call it Hyper V. If you weren’t virtualized before, you are now. Specific software for virtual backup exists but there is little integration with physical servers, tape backups or cross platform Microsoft/Linux.

2006 AD – XOsoft’s WANsync technology is integrated into Arcserve. For the first time mid-market users can perform both backup and full system failover from one solution.

2008 AD – Microsoft releases their competing product to VMware, they call it Hyper V. If you weren’t virtualized before, you are now. Specific software for virtual backup exists but there is little integration with physical servers, tape backups or cross platform Microsoft/Linux.

After a busy day of writing emails, copying and pasting into spreadsheets and tweaking objects in this and that presentation; I was finishing up the last of it… tapping away on my laptop at the kitchen table when my right hand suddenly slipped and the mouse went “Saturday Night Fever” on me across the tabletop only to knock a glass of water off the side.

As the glass fell in slow motion, my left hand – still resting on the keyboard, jumped into action and out of pure reflex hit CTRL Z. To paint the picture for those of you who do not use keyboard shortcuts, I tried to stop a real life glass of water from breaking on my kitchen floor by using a computer’s “Undo” command. And… smash.

This immediately provided my Mrs. with a new entry for her long catalogue of ‘silly things Louis has done’, the source material for her best jokes at my expense. It was one morning as I melodramatically writhed in pain following a stubbed little toe that she suggested satirically “Why don’t you just hit CTRL Z?” Funny…I’m told. But it got me thinking about it again and you know what? I need CTRL Z in my life.

This is the stuff science fiction is made of! Oh to imagine what it would be like to live in a virtual world where you can pick the rules, read the dark warnings of William Gibson’s Burning Chrome or enjoy the pop asceticism of The Matrix. However, as we spend even more time online, our lives routinely uploaded there, perhaps the future is closer than we think.

What commands would you want in your virtual world? I am just a Backup and Disaster Recovery guy so please forgive my lack of imagination for this bucket list of Louis’ Must Have Commands For His Virtual World:

1. Save a Recovery Point from when I was 21 so I can go back and have hair again any time I want.

2. Replicate myself on holiday. After deduplicating and compressing myself so that I could travel on even a modest connection, I would encrypt myself and then, either real time or scheduled, replicate myself to a datacenter in Barbados. NICE!

3. Use Virtual Standby to create a lookalike of me. Not feeling like work today? I would spin up a Virtual Machine copy of myself fully equipped with all the relevant data; applications and send the poor chap into work instead.

4. Archive my fashion mistakes to the cloud. This is pretty much all the way from 1995 till present day with only a few exceptions like weddings and one or two fancy dress parties. I would take Granular Restore with that just in-case I am ever feeling nostalgic and want to have a laugh at one or two badly dressed memories without having to remember the whole lot.

5. Make everything much easier to do than it currently is. I’m thinking of absolutely everything here; but specific examples include: baking a decent macaron, DARPA’s math challenge and Morris dancing.

6. Deduplicate plastic bags. If only we could delete all the unnecessary plastic bags in the World! Well this is my virtual world and we just did it! Of course we’ll keep one plastic bag to put in a museum somewhere…

There is probably a far more controversial version of this list available to anyone who uses Adobe Photoshop extensively; but all of the above mentioned Backup and Disaster Recovery capabilities are available at this very moment with ArcserveUDP in both software and appliance options. And for those of us left wanting CTRL Z right now and in the real world, Virtual Reality exists via our smartphones and we still have the power to untag bad photos of ourselves on the likes of Twitter and other social media platforms. Things are looking up – we’re getting there!